NEW ORLEANS  Never has there been a more bizarre Super Bowl, but this is a crazy place, where the weird, wonderful and bad happens every day. The people live below the Mississippi. Some practice voodoo. They party until they sleep standing up. They speak their own language (languages). It’s old. Its buildings sweat. It’s not the United States as we know it.

Anything can happen in New Orleans and Sunday night something that can’t happen did. The Superdome closed its eyes for a while and all the Mardi Gras king’s horses and all the king’s men had trouble reviving her.

The NFL says it can’t bring another Super Bowl to Qualcomm Stadium but it has no problem coming to the venerable Superdome, which carries the name of Mercedes- Benz but runs more like a Yugo. At least Qualcomm doesn’t need candles and hurricane lamps to play a football game.

With 13:22 to play in the third quarter of Sunday night’s Super Bowl XLVII, the Baltimore Ravens were soaring, up 28-6 on the San Francisco 49ers. And then, as you and 100 million other folks know, most of the lights went out in the Superdome.

They didn’t just go out. They were out for 35 minutes. Just before they came all the way back on, the TV cameras caught Ravens coach John Harbaugh lighting up Mike Kensil, the NFL’s VP of operations. And I have a good idea what John was angry about (he wasn’t just a little bit ticked).

His team had played brilliantly and he was about to put the hammer down on brother Jim’s 49ers, whose jugular was showing. And now all the momentum Baltimore built had stopped. Worst fears, you know. By the time the third quarter came to an end, the Niners had scored two touchdowns and a field goal to close it to 28-23, with Baltimore inside the red zone at the end of the quarter.

“Momentum turned and they handled it really well,” John would say afterward. “They handled it better than we did.”

The final score was 34-31, Ravens, and the strange thing is that, in this case, the score almost seems anticlimactic because of what went on in front of it. Certainly, there never has been a Super Bowl quite like this one, not even the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, because so many people never saw it live.

The blame for the outage was placed on the Superdome, not the power company, and then the Superdome blamed the power company. Well, it is New Orleans. But there is no excuse for what happened during the biggest football game in the world. That’s not how the NFL operates _ or at least that’s not how it used to operate, which meant every stone you saw was turned.

But what the blackout did was transform a dud into a rousing football game, a real battle of brothers, and quarterbacks, Baltimore’s Joe Flacco and San Francisco’s Colin Kaepernick, who had themselves a duel. The Ravens, stopped at the one, chose to go for a field goal to make it 31-23 (Harbaugh earlier had sent kicker Justin Tucker on a fake field goal that failed, one I’m sure he wishes he could have had back).

Still, the 49ers, now feeling their oats (whatever that means), came right back and scored on a 15-yard run by Kaepernick (they failed on a two-point conversion) to make it 31-29 with 9:57 to play. But San Francisco never got any closer. The Ravens took an intentional safety when up 34-29 with 11 seconds to play in regulation.

Flacco, who threw for three touchdowns and didn’t have an interception in the playoffs, was named the game’s MVP, completing 22 of 33 passes for 287 yards. Kaepernick, after a fairly slow start, passed 28 times, completing 16 for 302 yards and a touchdown. He did carry six times for 62 yards, but the Ravens didn’t do that bad a job against the read-option, although the massive 49ers offensive line probably wore on them later on.

“The players did a great job playing with discipline,” said John Harbaugh, adding Kaepernick “has guts, the guts of a burglar.”

So this marked the end of one of the more bizarre weeks in Super Bowl history, beginning with the Harbaugh brothers getting all the attention, then the weird deer antler story and the gay-bashing and culminating in the Harbaugh brothers meeting at midfield, only one of them victorious.

“Meeting Jim in the middle of the field probably was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my life,” John Harbaugh said.